Unification of Italy

• 1. Introduction

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  The Unification of Italy, known in Italian as the Risorgimento, a word meaning "rising again", produced a nation from a peninsula that had been divided for more than a thousand years. On the 17th of March 1861, the Italian Parliament proclaimed the Kingdom of Italy. Yet on that date, Rome itself was not part of the new country. The pope still ruled it. French soldiers guarded it. And the man whose armies had won the south, Giuseppe Garibaldi, had already returned quietly to his island home off Sardinia. How does a nation come together when its greatest champion is sent away before the job is finished, when its new capital is not yet in its hands, and when its founding prime minister will be dead in three months? Those questions are what the Risorgimento, at its core, is really about.

• 2. A Peninsula, Not a Nation

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  Italy was last unified under the Roman Republic in the latter part of the third century BCE. For seven centuries after that, it served as a de facto territorial extension of Rome, holding a privileged status without becoming a province in the formal sense. Then, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, it fractured. The Ostrogoths held it briefly in one piece; the Lombards and the Byzantine Empire pulled it apart after 568. By the Renaissance, the peninsula had become a patchwork of city-states, a southern kingdom ruled alternately from Sicily or Naples, and a band of central territory governed by the pope as a temporal monarch.

  Renaissance writers felt the wound. Petrarch wrote that "the ancient valour in Italian hearts is not yet dead" in his poem Italia Mia, and Machiavelli later quoted four verses from that same poem in The Prince, calling for a political leader who would unite Italy "to free her from the barbarians". These were literary wishes, not political programs. The Italian Wars that began with Charles VIII's invasion of Naples in 1494 lasted sixty-five years and settled nothing in Italy's favour; the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559 handed much of the peninsula to the Spanish Habsburgs.

  In 1764, Gian Rinaldo Carli captured the identity puzzle in his essay Della Patria degli Italiani, retelling a scene in which a stranger in a Milan café confounded the regulars by saying he was neither a foreigner nor a Milanese. When they asked what he was, he answered: "I am an Italian." The anecdote drew blank stares, which was rather the point. Carli's visitor would have to wait nearly a century for a country to belong to.

• 3. Napoleon's Unintended Gift

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  French Revolutionary armies swept into Italy between 1792 and 1797, and the Habsburg grip that had tightened after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 collapsed in a matter of months. The Holy Roman Empire itself was dissolved in 1806, when Emperor Francis II formally wound it up following Napoleon's victory at the Battle of Austerlitz. French rule swept away feudal structures and replaced them with modern legal codes, republican principles, and an idea of citizenship that had not existed under the Bourbons or the Habsburgs.

  One concrete legacy appeared in 1797, when the Cispadane Republic, a Napoleonic sister state, became the first sovereign Italian state to formally adopt the Italian tricolour as its national flag. The green, white, and red combination had appeared even earlier: Italian national colours showed up on a tricolour cockade in 1789, and the Lombard Legion adopted the first Italian military war flag in those colours in 1796. The tricolour would outlast Napoleon by many decades, becoming the symbol of patriotic resistance after the Congress of Vienna restored the old order in 1814-15.

  When the First French Empire fell in 1814, it left behind something the old dynasties had never provided: an intellectual framework for thinking about Italy as a single political space. The rulers Napoleon had installed tried to keep their thrones; Joachim Murat, King of Naples, issued the Rimini Proclamation on the 30th of March 1815, calling on Italians to revolt against their Austrian occupiers. The appeal failed, but the habit of imagining Italian unity as a political goal had taken root in ways that would not easily be uprooted.

• 4. Secret Societies and Exiled Dreamers

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  The Carbonari, a secret political organisation that had formed in southern Italy early in the 19th century, filled a void left when Freemasonry was suppressed after 1815 for its French associations. The movement drew middle-class professionals, businessmen, and some intellectuals. Its members developed their own rituals, were strongly anticlerical, and were inspired by the French Revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity while disavowing Napoleon himself. Conservative governments imposed stiff penalties on men discovered to belong to it, yet it survived and fuelled political turmoil well past the moment of unification.

  The Carbonari even turned on Napoleon III: they condemned him to death for failing to unite Italy, and came close to killing him in 1858, when Felice Orsini, Giovanni Andrea Pieri, Carlo Di Rudio, and Andrea Gomez threw three bombs at him. The episode illustrated both the organisation's radical ambitions and its limits. Historian Cornelia Shiver doubted that Carbonari achievements were proportional to their pretensions.

  Outside Italy, in exile, the movement's political imagination ran further. Giuseppe Mazzini, arrested soon after joining the Carbonari, used his prison time to conclude that Italy could and should become a unified, free, republican nation, with Rome as its capital. On his release in 1831, he went to Marseille and founded La Giovine Italia, Young Italy, with the mottos "Dio e Popolo" and "Unione, Forza e Libertà". Giuseppe Garibaldi, a native of Nice, joined a Piedmontese uprising in 1834, was sentenced to death, escaped to South America, and spent fourteen years there learning guerrilla warfare before returning in 1848. The literary world added its own pressure: Alessandro Manzoni's novel I promessi sposi, published in 1827 and revised substantially in a 1840 edition written in standardised Tuscan, was widely read as an allegorical critique of Austrian rule.

• 5. 1848 and the Price of Failure

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  On the 5th of January 1848, Milanese citizens launched a civil disobedience campaign, stopping smoking cigars and playing the lottery to deny Austria the associated tax revenue. It was a small gesture, but it opened a year of upheaval. In Sicily, revolt produced the Kingdom of Sicily under Ruggero Settimo. Grand Duke Leopold II granted Tuscany a constitution. Pope Pius IX, in a move his own advisers called unexpected, granted a constitution to the Papal States on the 21st of February. King Louis Philippe of France fled Paris two days later.

  In Milan, street fighting from the 18th to the 22nd of March expelled the Austrian garrison; the five days became known as the Cinque giornate di Milano. King Charles Albert of Sardinia declared war on Austria in what became the First Italian War of Independence, winning early at Goito and Peschiera before Marshal Radetzky crushed him at the Battle of Custoza on the 24th of July. In Rome, Pius IX fled after his minister Pellegrino Rossi was assassinated in November 1848. A Roman Republic was proclaimed on the 9th of February 1849, with Mazzini arriving in March as its Chief Minister. Its constitution guaranteed religious freedom under article 7, papal independence under article 8 of the Principi fondamentali, and abolished the death penalty under article 5.

  The republics did not survive the year. France sent a force under Charles Oudinot that besieged Rome; the city capitulated on the 29th of June 1849. Venice, defended by Daniele Manin and Guglielmo Pepe, surrendered on the 24th of August. Pro-independence fighters were hanged en masse at Belfiore. Mazzini and Garibaldi went back into exile; Garibaldi sailed to New York City in 1850. The lesson absorbed by the surviving patriots was stark: small Italian states could not beat France and Austria alone, the pope would never lead a unified Italy, and republicanism lacked the mass support needed to win.

• 6. Cavour's Calculated Diplomacy

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  Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, born in 1810, was not a romantic revolutionary. He was a moderniser: interested in railways, banking, agrarian reform, and free trade. When censorship eased enough to allow it, he founded a newspaper called Il Risorgimento, which advocated independence, a league of Italian princes, and moderate reform. He became prime minister of Piedmont-Sardinia in 1852. By 1855 he had joined Britain and France in the Crimean War, giving Piedmont a seat at the table of great powers and a diplomatic credibility that Mazzini's pamphlets could never provide.

  The key relationship was with Napoleon III of France. Cavour found his alliance in April 1859 and provoked Austria with military manoeuvres until war began. Austria had an army of 140,000 men against the Sardinians' 70,000, but the Austrian leadership had been appointed by the Emperor on the basis of noble lineage rather than military competence. Their army took almost ten days to travel the eighty kilometres to Turin. By then the French had reinforced Sardinia, and Austria retreated. The Austrians were defeated at the Battle of Magenta on the 4th of June, and at the Battle of Solferino, France and Sardinia forced Austria to negotiate. The Armistice of Villafranca, signed on the 12th of July, gave Lombardy to Sardinia while leaving Austria in control of the Veneto.

  By March 1860, Sardinia had annexed the United Provinces of Central Italy, comprising Tuscany, Parma, Modena, and the Papal Legations. The price was steep: Savoy and Nice were handed to France under the Treaty of Turin on the 24th of March 1860. Garibaldi, whose birthplace was Nice, never forgave Cavour for this. The Niçard exodus that followed saw a quarter of the region's Italian population emigrate to Italy rather than become French.

• 7. Garibaldi's Thousand

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  On the 6th of May 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi and roughly a thousand Italian volunteers set sail from Quarto near Genoa. After stopping in Talamone, they landed near Marsala on the west coast of Sicily on the 11th of May. Near Salemi, scattered rebel bands joined Garibaldi's force; the combined army defeated the Two Sicilies at the Battle of Calatafimi on the 13th of May. Within three days, the force had grown to 4,000 men.

  The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies had an army of 150,000 on paper, but its Swiss mercenaries had been recalled home under a new Swiss law banning its citizens from foreign military service. This left King Francis II, son of the notorious Ferdinand II, with mostly unreliable native troops. Neapolitan general Ferdinando Lanza arrived in Sicily with some 25,000 soldiers and bombarded Palermo nearly to ruins during the Siege of Palermo that began on the 27th of May. A British admiral intervened, an armistice was declared, and Neapolitan troops departed, surrendering the city to Garibaldi's smaller force. Six weeks later, Garibaldi attacked Messina; its citadel fell within a week.

  Crossing the Strait of Messina with the Neapolitan fleet at hand, Garibaldi marched north. On the 18th and the 21st of August, the populations of Basilicata and Apulia independently declared annexation to the Kingdom of Italy. On the 6th of September, Francis II gathered the 4,000 troops still loyal to him and retreated over the River Volturno. The next day, Garibaldi entered Naples by train to a public welcome. The fall of Palermo had already drawn international attention; when Garibaldi met Victor Emmanuel II at Teano and greeted him as King of Italy, he then retired to the island of Caprera. Three months later, on the 18th of February 1861, Victor Emmanuel assembled the first Italian Parliament in Turin.

• 8. Rome, the Unfinished Capital

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  On the 27th of March 1861, Parliament declared Rome the capital of Italy. The city, however, belonged to the pope, and French troops stood between the new kingdom and its stated seat of government. Garibaldi grew impatient. In June 1862, he sailed from Genoa, landed at Palermo, and gathered volunteers under the slogan "o Roma o Morte" ("either Rome or Death"). The Italian government was alarmed rather than supportive. A division of regular troops under Colonel Pallavicino met Garibaldi's force at Aspromonte on the 28th of August. When a regular soldier fired a chance shot and volleys followed, Garibaldi forbade his men to return fire on fellow Italian subjects. He was wounded, taken to Varignano by steamer, and held for a time before being released.

  Negotiation produced the September Convention of 1864, in which Napoleon III agreed to withdraw French troops from Rome within two years in exchange for Italy pledging not to attack the Papal States. The last French troops left Rome in December 1866. The seat of government moved that year from Turin to Florence, a shift that caused such violent disturbances in Turin that the king had to leave the city in haste.

  In 1867, Garibaldi made a second attempt to take Rome. Two brothers, Enrico and Giovanni Cairoli, and 70 companions floated down the Tiber from Terni to coincide with an uprising inside the city. On the 22nd of October 1867, revolutionaries inside Rome seized the Capitoline Hill and Piazza Colonna, but by the time the Cairoli group reached Villa Glori on the northern outskirts, the uprising had already been suppressed. During the night, Papal Zouaves surrounded the group. Enrico was mortally wounded and died in Giovanni's arms. Giovanni survived but never recovered; an eyewitness recorded his dying words on the 11th of September 1869, in which he spoke of Mentana, called for his dead brother, and insisted: "we will certainly win; we will go to Rome."

  The Franco-Prussian War broke the deadlock. In early August 1870, Napoleon III recalled his garrison from Rome. King Victor Emmanuel II sent Count Gustavo Ponza di San Martino to Pope Pius IX with a personal letter proposing a peaceful entry of Italian troops under the guise of protecting the pontiff. Pius IX responded by throwing the letter on the table and declaring: "You are all a set of vipers, of whited sepulchres, and wanting in faith." He then added: "I am no prophet, nor son of a prophet, but I tell you, you will never enter Rome." General Raffaele Cadorna crossed the Papal frontier on the 11th of September with the Royal Italian Army. On the 20th of September, after a three-hour cannonade had breached the Aurelian Walls at Porta Pia, the Bersaglieri entered Rome and marched down what was immediately renamed Via XX Settembre. Forty-nine Italian soldiers and four officers died in the breach, along with nineteen Papal troops. A plebiscite on the 2nd of October confirmed annexation; the capital was officially transferred from Florence to Rome in July 1871, fulfilling the declaration Parliament had made a decade earlier.